Bamidbar
How do we empty ourselves into greater clarity?
Reflection by Jes Golden, Or HaLev Teacher
“In Parshat Bamidbar, we are literally `in the wilderness.` God instructs Moshe to count the Israelites in the second year of their exodus. A census is taken in the desert of every male of fighting age, with the Levites numbered separately. But why does this census happen specifically in the wilderness (midbar)?
The midbar is not incidental to the story. It is where Moshe first encounters Hashem at the burning bush when he wandered to the farthest edge of the wilderness while tending his father-in-law's flock (Shemot 3:1). The Torah is likewise given in the wilderness, on a mountain belonging to no one, in a place stripped of distractions. There is a sense in which making oneself alone, as in the practice of hitbodedut, creates the possibility of understanding the gifts and challenges of our life in a new light.
Bamidbar Rabbah (1:7) asks why Torah was given in the midbar: `Anyone who does not make himself hefker–ownerless–like the midbar cannot acquire the Torah.` To receive what the wilderness offers, we have to shed our usual attachments, identities, and habitual assumptions. Our contemplative practice echoes this wisdom. In this moment in the exodus story, we glimpse what is necessary before the Israelites later receive Torah: emptying ourselves out and opening to the midbar so that a new kind of perception becomes possible.
Yet the census also occurs here, in this same wilderness. The desert is a place of potential chaos, and when we are confronted with uncertainty, we seek order. Counting is a way of creating order, but order requires attention to what is in front of us. There is seemingly a paradox: confronting and opening to the emptiness of the midbar, while also accounting for who is present. Can we really do both things at once?
Perhaps these are not two separate acts but a single arc of shifting attention. In our contemplative practice, it is often first the act of emptying that makes it possible to note: thinking, judging, desiring, loving. As we become able to count and note what is in front of us, the expansive sense of being hefker likewise deepens our awareness of divinity within us and around us. Both feed our practice of devekut, of cleaving to the Divine, of seeing what is really here in experience while holding it lightly. The midbar strips us down for the sake of clear perception. From this place of simultaneous emptying and noticing, we prepare our heart-minds for revelation.
May this parsha invite us into the wilderness of our own practice, where we become hefker enough to see clearly, and from that seeing, to count the people, gifts, challenges, and joys that constitute our awareness.”